How can we explain kindness and cruelty? Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Why do people so often disagree about moral issues? This course explores the psychological foundations of our moral lives.

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Paul Bloom

Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University

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[BLANK_AUDIO] In the last lecture we talked about disgust and the power of disgust to demonize people. The power of disgust to take something and turn it into an immoral act. The power of disgust to take a person and turn them into something you're repelled by. But emotions can also be positive. Our gut feelings can be positive towards somebody. And they also show interesting effects. Some of this I think is fairly obvious. If you go to Google images and type in cute baby, this is one of the first images that comes out. And it's a sort of creature many of us would find very difficult to harm. Very easy to feel fondly towards, that will elicit a desire to protect. And, it's not because of any deep principles or deep facts we know about the creature. It's because it's adorable, because, because of the big eyes and the round cheeks and these sort of cues that we've been wired up to respond to. And, and, and our, the effects of these cues and how we feel towards people and how we feel towards creatures has, has real effects. Here are two animals. Now, I actually don't have a strong opinion as to which animal is smarter, which animal has a richer emotional life. Which animal feels more pain. I think it's a sort of very hard question. But, what's not a hard question is I know which animal people care about more. One animal we bring into our houses, and we we, we give treats to, and we hold birthday parties for, and we love. And, the other kind of animal we eat. And this does not have to do with the features of the animal. It has to do with, with how they look. Kittens are cute. Pigs are not. There are other distinctions one could make, more subtle distinctions one could make, concerning sort of positive responses. And their effects on moral reasoning. So, one research program I've been interested in is, concerns the effects of looking at people's bodies, and to what extent does looking at people's bodies affect how you judge them and think about them morally. So in one experiment I did with several collaborators, this work. That was led by the psychologist Kirk Grey, we showed people pictures and either of the pictures were of faces or the pictures included the depiction of the bodies; representation of the bodies. And it turns out that when you see somebody's body, it has two effects on your reasoning about them. One is, you actually, in some way, care more about them. You think that they're more vulnerable to pain. You think they're more sensitive to, to, to, to being hurt. You worry a little bit more about them. But you also tend to deny them moral agency. What I mean by this is that, for most of us, when you look at somebody, you say, well, there's a person that could be blamed, they could be praised, they're responsible for their own actions, they make their own decisions. But when you see somebody's body, that tendency to think of them as an agent goes down a bit. Now this, these pictures, the difference I'm showing you here is fairly subtle. And we thought in our experiments we'd be stuck with those sort of subtle distinctions until we found this wonderful book. And this book has photographs, side by side, of the very same men and women. But, in one picture, they're fully dressed. And in the other pictures, they're entirely naked. And so, we used those pictures in our experiments. And by doing so, we, we again, we found that when people are naked, you tend, in some way, to be more concerned about them. But also, you tend to deny them moral agency. It really matters. There's something, there's some real psycological truth. To the claim made by feminist scholars, that the objectification of women, thinking of women as sexual beings, as physical beings, has an effect, perhaps a pernicious effect on how you think about them and what we find in this work is, it applies to men as well as women. I'll also just add parenthetically, this is a wonderful book, I'm hoping people got my book, just babies, supplemental reading for the course. If you did, you should put these two books together on your shelves separately and then people will look at them and they will wonder what kind of person you are. so, why do naked people, why do bodies, have this sort of effect on us? And there are different explanations. One explanation is, that, they inspire lust. And lust somehow blocks certain morals. Sentiment makes you think about a person a different way. Another possibility, that is sort of separate from lust, is that if you see somebody without clothes. They're more like an animal, they lose their dignity. They lose their status. And it's that which is driving the effect. And we actually, in our research, we don't know the answer to that. But we do know, from other work, that the feeling of lust, the feeling of sexual arousal can have an affect on your moral decision making. And we know this from to some extent, from common sense. But to a large extent from a lovely and troubling study by Dan Ariely and George Lowenstein. So, they use, in this study they tested a bunch of subjects, all of whom were heterosexual males. And it would be interesting to do this more broadly, but they studied heterosexual males. And what they did in the study was, they asked these heterosexual males about there's a list of questions about their sexual desires. Would you have sex with this, would you have sex with that, would you have sex with this? As well as other questions, including questions about what sort of sexual behaviors they would do, including behaviors that were forms of sexual coercion, or so-called date rape. And then they got the data. But what was interesting about the study was that they collected the data when subjects were either not aroused, just answering questions, or when they're aroused. So the way they did it was, they asked subjects to bring home a laptop computer. The laptop computer, for reasons that will become apparent, was wrapped in plastic Saran wrap. And then, in the privacy of their own room, they were given a series of questions. And, and to answer the questions, they were asked to use a one-handed keyboard using their non-dominant hand. Now half of the subjects were just said, okay, answer a bunch of questions. The questions appeared on a screen. That's the non-aroused group. The other half was shown erotic imagery on the laptop screen and were asked to masturbate until they became quite aroused. They're not supposed to get too aroused but until they get quite aroused. Then they get to answer the questions. And what, what Ariely and Lowenstein found was significant differences in how they answered the questions. So I'll put the data up. This is like, like a lot of stuff to look at, but to me it's fascinating and well worth studying carefully. But I'll just take a couple of examples. So you could ask people whether or not they could imagine being attracted to a 12-year-old girl. And it turns out if people were non-aroused, like, you know, a quarter say yeah. But when they're aroused, it doubles. Or or becoming sexually excited, by an animal. Very few people, say yes when they're not aroused. But when they are aroused it about triples. But those aren't the most disturbing findings. The most disturbing findings involved a sort of date rapey, questions. And they have a host of questions. Here and he could see the answers that people give when they aren't aroused. And now compare it to the answers they give when they're aroused. So look in fact the last one, which is, would you slip a woman a drug to increase the chances that she would have sex with you? When men were not aroused, 5% said yes. If, a, a ra, a number indistinguishable from sort of pressing the wrong button. But this number got much, much bigger when they were aroused. Now, I think this implic, this, this work has practical implications. I, it tells people, that your psychology changes when you're aroused. You're no longer the same person in an important sense. Your sense of what turns you on when you're aroused is different from when you're not aroused. And what you would do is different from when you're aroused and not aroused. But from a more theoretical standpoint, it nicely illustrates the sort of theme we've been working on that, not just emotions like disgust, but emotions such as lust can change your moral psychology. And it's yet another argument that our morality can be influenced by not just by reason, but by the emotions. [MUSIC]